Eye of the Century: Cinema, Experience, Modernity

By Francesco Casetti

Is it true that film in the twentieth century experimented with vision more than any other art form? And what visions did it privilege? In this brilliant book, acclaimed film scholar Francesco Casetti situates the cinematic experience within discourses of twentieth-century modernity. He suggests that film defined a unique gaze, not only because it recorded many of the century's most important events, but also because it determined the manner in which they were received.

Casetti begins by examining film's nature as a medium in an age obsessed with immediacy, nearness, and accessibility. He considers the myths and rituals cinema constructed on the screen and in the theater and how they provided new images and behaviors that responded to emerging concerns, ideas, and social orders. Film also succeeded in negotiating the different needs of modernity, comparing and uniting conflicting stimuli, providing answers in a world torn apart by conflict, and satisfying a desire for everydayness, as well as lightness, in people's lives. The ability to communicate, the power to inform, and the capacity to negotiate-these are the three factors that defined film's function and outlook and made the medium a relevant and vital art form of its time.

So what kind of gaze did film create? Film cultivated a personal gaze, intimately tied to the emergence of point of view, but also able to restore the immediacy of the real; a complex gaze, in which reality and imagination were combined; a piercing gaze, achieved by machine, and yet deeply anthropomorphic; an excited gaze, rich in perceptive stimuli, but also attentive to the spectator's orientation; and an immersive gaze, which gave the impression of being inside the seen world while also maintaining a sense of distance. Each of these gazes combined two different qualities and balanced them. The result was an ever inventive synthesis that strived to bring about true compromises without ever sacrificing the complexity of contradiction. As Casetti demonstrates, film proposed a vision that, in making opposites permeable, modeled itself on an oxymoronic principle. In this sense, film is the key to reading and understanding the modern experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jun 5, 2008
• ISBN: 9780231511490

Book preview

Eye of the Century

FILM + CULTURE SERIES

JOHN BELTON, GENERAL EDITOR

EYE OF THE CENTURY

FILM, EXPERIENCE, MODERNITY

FRANCESCO CASETTI

TRANSLATED BY ERIN LARKIN WITH JENNIFER PRANOLO

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS • NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2005 RCS Libri S.p.A., Bompiani

Translation © 2008 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51149-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Casetti, Francesco.

[Occhio del Novecento. English]

Eye of the century : film, experience, modernity / Francesco Casetti;

translated by Erin Larkin with Jennifer Pranolo.

  p. cm.—(Film and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-13994-6 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-13995-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-0-231-51149-0 (ebook)

1. Motion pictures—History.   2. Motion pictures—Social aspects.   I. Title.

PN1993.5.A1C37413   2008

791.4309—DC22

2007053009

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

BOOK + JACKET DESIGNED BY THE STATE OF EMOTION

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

A HUNDRED YEARS, A CENTURY

1   

THE GAZE OF ITS AGE

Seeing

Synchronies

De l’art et du traffic

If Orestes Becomes Rio Jim

Laideur et beauté

Film, Twentieth Century

2   

FRAMING THE WORLD

More, Less

The Eagle, the Fly and the Emperor

What Ever Happened to the Black Man?

With Closed Eyes

Nostalgia for Something

3   

DOUBLE VISION

Properties of the Gaze

And What Do You Know About Him?

A Face, the Eyes

The Law, a Rifle, and Memory

Observing, Reconstructing, Inventing

Exercises in Recognition

The Eye at Stake

4   

THE GLASS EYE

The Mechanism of Life

The Monkey with the Camera

Notebooks of M. K, operator

King Kong on Broadway

Resisting the Light

The Beast and the Marionette

5   

STRONG SENSATIONS

Intensification of the Nervous Life

Running Against Time

Marfa’s Sex

Reason and Sensation

Constructing Emotions

6   

THE PLACE OF THE OBSERVER

In the Heart of Things

Josh’s Lesson

John Sims in the Audience

Thomas, Watching

The Lost Position

7   

GLOSSES, OXYMORONS, AND DISCIPLINE

The Circuit of Social Discourses

To Give a Form, to Negotiate

Discipline of the Eye

Decalogue

REMAINS OF THE DAY

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IN THE MANY YEARS I have been working on this book (and it is up to the reader to decide if they have been well spent or not), I have incurred many intellectual debts, which are impossible to relate in detail here. I will limit myself to remembering those who, through conference invitations and collections, allowed me to progress in my research: Giuliana Bruno, Paolo Bertetto, David Bordwell, Domenec Font, Elio Franzini, Miriam Hansen, Leonardo Quaresima, David Rodowick, Ayako Saito, Tom Gunning, Steve Ungar, Federica Villa, and Giulia Carluccio.

Among the friends and colleagues who read portions of the manuscript, I want thank for their precious advice Gianni Canova, Ruggero Eugeni, Maria Grazia Fanchi, Anne Kern, Pietro Montani, Peppino Ortoleva, Guglielmo Pescatore, Francesco Pitassio, Antonio Somaini, Pierre Sorlin, Massimo Locatelli, and Giacomo Manzoli. Luca Mazzei and Silvio Alovisio were extraordinarily helpful in locating materials. A special thanks goes to Francesca Piredda and Deborah Toschi for their revision of footnotes. For the realization of the English edition, I’m deeply indebted to Erin Larkin, for her patience in translating my Italian, and to Jennifer Pranolo, for her merciless scrutiny in revising the manuscript. Jeffries Toby Levers was generous in his stylistic suggestions for the final English version. Also, my copyeditor Roy Thomas at Columbia University Press did wonderful work on the manuscript. My editors, Elisabetta Sgarbi at Bompiani and Juree Sondker at Columbia University Press, deserve a special mention for their positive attitude.

This book has a special tie to Yale University. I finished the book during my residency there as a visiting professor in 2005; the English version was improved with further references (and in some points rewritten for the sake of clarity) during the spring semester of 2007, when I again taught at Yale. I’m deeply indebted to Dudley Andrew, Giuseppe Mazzotta, and Penny Marcus for making possible my teaching and research experience at Yale. Discussions with David Quint, Christopher Wood, and Brigitte Peuker were incomparably productive. A special thanks to Charlie Musser for his Wednesday night dinners, so rich in intellectual and personal exchange.

This book was written at a time in which recognition for my teachers is becoming ever more acute, and my need to repay what I gained from them ever stronger. Thus I dedicate this work to those from whom I have learned the most: Christian Metz, Lino Micciché, Gianfranco Bettetini, and Giovanni Cesareo; and to my students, past and future, with the hope of having taught them, too.

A Hundred Years, A Century

In an article appearing in the Torinese newspaper La Stampa in 1908, art critic Enrico Thovez linked a recent invention with the new century. This invention—the cinema—would become the unmistakable emblem of its time. Thovez writes:

If, in order to give the name to a period of time, we call upon the individual or idea that had the greatest influence on its minds, that most profoundly dominated human existence, we can anticipate the answer: the current century … will simply be the age of film. For no work of art, scientific invention, economic trend, enterprise, thinking or form of fashion can compete in terms of breadth of achievement, depth of diffusion or universality of consensus with this humble wooden box, its handle turned by some poor wretch perched in the shadows, as the interminable strip of celluloid, sown with its microscopic images, unwinds with a gentle humming sound.¹

The millennium came to a close as film celebrated its one hundredth anniversary. The two destinies Thovez invokes—that of film and that of the twentieth century—have perhaps run their course. With the advent of the digital age, for example, cinema no longer depends on the photographic image, and earlier technological, social, or political advances have been surpassed or repudiated as well. The bold prescience of this long forgotten essayist is, however, striking. The twentieth century was the age of film—or, at any rate, it was largely perceived as such. Film’s microscopic images mirrored the trajectory of this century, recording events as they took place, asserting themselves as a widespread presence, and becoming constant points of reference. Thus, it is worthwhile to inquire what cinema gave to and took from its age, in an exchange based on open and reciprocal complicities. The project of this book will be to trace how cinema—through a series of negotiations—molded modern cultural and intellectual history. Indeed film was not only the perfect translator of the last century but also an active agent determining how its turbulent decades would unfold.

Much has been written in recent years on the close relationship between film and twentieth-century modernity. Such studies have examined, for example, ways in which film has constructed new forms of subjectivity, redefined space and time, expressed social, racial, and gender identities, as well as contributed to the mass industrialization of culture.² While I will be navigating some of these studies, I want to consider, first and foremost, the import behind Thovez’s prophecy. I will be addressing one key point: how is it possible to define the gaze that film claimed for the twentieth century? Is it true that film, in dialogue with its time, experimented more than any other art with new forms of vision that have become a common language? And what forms of vision did it inaugurate? How did film introduce these visions into the everyday? The following pages will focus on the idea that film was the eye of the twentieth century. Not only did it record a large number of its events, but—by recording them—it has also been able to structure a reflexive spectatorial experience in which to receive them.³

I understand that this metaphor of the eye presents some risks. It is no longer fashionable to speak of the gaze: many prefer to thematize vision within a wider framework of perceptual, affective, cognitive, and social processes.⁴ As the trend of these critiques demonstrates, the eye itself is often no longer considered a sensory organ, but is instead inserted within a larger matrix of analytic intelligibility. Yet we must not forget that film, from its inception, was first and foremost identified and publicized as a marvelously unprecedented optical device. As Eugenio Giovannetti, an Italian film critic, wrote at the moment of the rise of sound film: At the cinema, all eyes—even the near and farsighted—see clearly, deliciously clearly; herein lies the originality of the cinematographic performance, which we have all but forgotten.⁵ At the cinema we experience an almost inescapable sharpening of our visual capacity, whatever biological flaws might naturally hinder it.

Second, it is perhaps no longer even fashionable to speak of film in and of itself. Most recent scholarship tends, in fact, to place cinema within a cultural studies context of public entertainment, urban life, the spread of mass communication, production, distribution, and consumption.⁶ Early studies emphasized film’s mimicry of theater, painting, literature, etc. Some scholars advanced more surprising connections: in the aforementioned article, for example, Thovez inserted film among the surrogates which typify modern times. As the trinket-like celluloid imitations substitute real ivory, real tortoiseshell, real amber, so the celluloid filmstrip gives a cheap substitute for the hard-won constructions of genius.⁷ Yet even in the most charged of these scholarly treatments, film is recognized as a peculiarly singular phenomenon. Film requires specialized attention in and of itself. It has its own identity.

What kind of gaze, then, did twentieth-century cinema construct? Chapter 1 will examine the reasons for the particular synchrony between film and its time, and will attempt to gesture toward its relevance with respect to contemporary culture. Three characteristics seem to stand out. The first is film’s nature as a medium—not just an art—in an age that prizes the communicative dimension as a guarantee of immediacy, nearness, and accessibility. The second characteristic concerns the rites and myths that film created on screen and in the theaters, in a century that had a special need for original images and imaginative behaviors to reflect the issues of emerging social orders. The third is the compromise that film succeeded in achieving amid the different demands of modernity. It united conflicting stimuli in an age torn by strife and dilemma, offering them up in their mundane, yet at times touching and magical, everydayness. The ability to communicate, the power to shape or define, the drive to negotiate: these are the three central characteristics of film’s gaze.

The last characteristic—this aspect of negotiation—is the most decisive for understanding film’s gaze as I will define it. At stake, in fact, is a gaze that functions as an oxymoron: that is, it is capable of operating on opposing fronts, and at times collapsing them. Chapters 2 through 6 will explore this oxymoronic quality of the gaze. Within its negotiation of twentieth-century modernity, film arbitrated at least five conflicts among opposing stances. It cultivated a partial gaze, tied to the singleness of each take and its point of view, yet at the same time ready to grasp the totality of the world through movement and editing. Film developed a composite gaze, in which reality and fantasy merge, but in which the two planes are often carefully distinguished in order to avoid any confusion between them. In the same way, film promoted a penetrating gaze that utilizes the enhanced prosthetic vision of the camera, but which is also deeply anthropomorphic. Film fostered an excited gaze, rich in perceptive stimuli, but also attentive to maintain spectator orientation. Finally, film elaborated an immersive gaze that gives the impression of being inside the seen world, but which at the same time maintains the sense of distance. Each of these gazes combines two different qualities, balancing them. The threats inherent to one characteristic (the limited seeing tied to a point of view; the mechanical vision linked to a prosthetic camera; the overwhelming sensation due to excitation; etc.) are compensated by means of the other characteristic (the multiplication of the shots; the humanlike behavior of the camera; an implied observer who masters the depicted events; etc.). The result was an ever inventive synthesis of gazes that strived to bring about true compromises without ever sacrificing the complexity of contradiction. We thus have a vision that, in making opposites permeable, modeled itself on an oxymoronic principle.

In its search for compromises, film did not conceal tensions, but tried to obtain an advantage from them. In constructing its gaze, the stances of the epoch were combined at the price of slight displacements and condensations. Merged with the sense of totality, a fragment was no more a single piece, but a temporarily detached portion of a vaster reality. The need to maintain a reference to the human transformed the mechanical into a familiar presence. Connected with a sense of orientation, excitation became a simple cadence in the narration. Framed by the eye of the cinema, the forces and counterforces of modernity changed their orientation and their inflection. Film rewrote its epoch in order to answer the question of its time.

This rewriting was in accordance with the basic proprieties of the cinema. Each filmic image is a partial record contained within the frame, capturing new sides of reality through the mobility of the camera. The cut from one shot to another gives each image the quality of a shock; editing can control its emotional power. Closeness and distance with the depicted world are defined by the apparatus. Basic proprieties were important in defining the possibilities of cinema. Yet the compromises that film defined were attempts to answer the needs of its time. Cinema was a medium subordinated to the social. As Balázs suggests, technical development depends on social causes, and inventions take place when it is time for them to come.⁸

The formulas in which these various compromises were realized varied through time. Mainstream cinema of the thirties to the fifties did not respond in the same way as auteur cinema of the sixties and the seventies. The former carefully searched for balanced solutions; the latter was open to more dynamic and precarious answers. But if is true that the classical cinema systematically looked for compromises, it is also true that it displayed different strategies: one only needs to compare narratives based on a strong convergence of values around the hero’s vision with stories based on dual focus narratives, in which we have the coexistence of two perspectives.⁹ Hollywood’s modes of representation are characterized by a very articulated history.¹⁰ At the same time, the post-classical cinema (as well as the pre-classical and the anti-classical one) brought a more conflicted dimension to light—even though such conflicts hardly ever seemed irremediable. The fact remains that film developed its gaze by intercepting the impulses of twentieth-century modernity. It guided them in a particular direction, regulating their intensity, combining them, tying them to certain patterns or exigencies, finally giving them a model against which the spectator could compare him or herself. Film gave form to the modes of vision of its time, negotiating ongoing cultural processes, but ultimately it was the century’s most astute director. Film’s gaze was revealing. By fine-tuning a means of observation, film helped us to see better, and to see into the spirit of this particular time. Not surprisingly, we are dealing here with a disciplinary gaze as well: in opening our eyes, film told us what to look at and how. In this sense, film gave us a script for reading the modern experience: it not only proposed a reading of that experience, but at times imposed a pattern for its expression and communication.

This reflexivity of film’s function, which I will discuss further in chapter 7, explains how cinema was simultaneously a form of thought, on the one hand, and a discipline, on the other. By negotiating the questions of its time, cinema influenced the articulation of the mental categories used to face reality. And by giving the audience some ready-made formulae, it guided our eyes. Nevertheless, these formulae were always imposed through entertainment and play. If cinema ended up functioning as a discipline, it was a discipline which sought to embody the presence of a desire and the idea of freedom. Let us call it an unimposed discipline. This paradox confirms the oxymoronic nature of its action in an age that embraced the paradox as one of its most essential traits.¹¹

A quick remark about my methodology may be helpful. The analysis will be guided by both theoretical texts and films, which I will read sometimes in a heterodox way. There will be a large variety of references: I will turn to both well-known film scholarship as well as less known contributions, masterpieces as well as B-movies, film as well as philosophical and literary essays. This assemblage of divergent documents and the logic with which I pull them together will not obey philological criteria. Rather, the goal is to collect a network of discourses that can function as a gloss for the cinematic phenomenon and give it meaning on a collective stage. Therefore, we will put into play the way in which cinema presented itself to the eyes of society, and how it rendered itself a conceivable experience.

Such attention to the intersections between gaze, discourse, and experience will ground this study. The purpose is to illustrate how this circuit of discourses gave meaning to film within twentieth-century modernity, and—in a magnificent form of specularity—it is film that bestows meaning on the modern experience. Through the elaboration of its gazes, the cinema furnishes the bordering frame within which the age makes itself knowable—and bearable—to its subjects and spectators.

The Gaze of Its Age

SEEING

Stupor, appreciation, expectation. Since its invention, film has provoked debate about its significance and much speculation about what it might contribute to the new century. The conviction soon emerged that film could make us look at the world anew. It taught us not only to take a second look at the world, but to look in a different way. Film set our sense of vision free, restoring it to us with an invigorating potential.

This idea became a leitmotif of film criticism in the 1920s. Bela Balázs summed it up in a formulation that would become popular:

From the invention of printing, the word became the principal channel of communication between men … in the culture of words, the spirit—once so conspicuous—became almost invisible…. Now film is impressing on culture a change as radical as that of the invention of the press. Millions of people each night experience with their own eyes, sitting before the screen, the destinies of men, their personalities and feelings, states of mind of every sort, without needing words…. Man will go back to being visible.¹

Balázs said it clearly: film restores human visibility, and gives reality back to the gaze. Some of his contemporaries expressed it similarly. For example, Sebastiano A. Luciani:

The art of film has rendered us sensitive to the dynamic beauty of the face, in the same manner in which the theater made us sensitive to the voice. Where we once saw—in art and in life—only partially expressive masks, today we can say that we see faces.²

Or Jean Epstein:

The lens of the camera is an eye without prejudice, without morals, untouched by any influence; it sees in the face and in gesture features that we, consumed with our likes and dislikes, habits and thoughts, are no longer able to see.³

And for Abel Gance, this notion assumed a jubilant tone:

The cinema will endow man with a new sense. He will see through his eyes. He will be sensitive to brilliant versification as he has been to prosody. He will see the birds and the wind come to rest. A ray will shine down. A street will seem as beautiful as a Greek temple.⁴

Film taught us to look at the world as we had never been able to before. This idea recurs in many contemporary works.⁵ It is supported by another belief that in some ways clarifies and radicalizes it: if film reconquered and recast our manner of seeing, it was not only because it embodied the gaze of the human eye, but because it embodied the gaze of the twentieth century. The camera captured what lay before it in forms that revealed the attitudes and orientations with which people were compelled to look at the world around them. On the screen, more than a reality objectively recorded, we saw reality in the spirit of the time.⁶

Frequently, the same scholars who emphasized the renewal of vision with film became its chief interpreters as well. Luciani, for example, goes on to comment:

The telephone, automobile, airplane and radio have so altered the limits of time and space within which civilizations have developed, that today man has ended up acquiring not so much a quickness of understanding unknown to the ancients, as a kind of ubiquity. Film seems the artistic reflection of this new condition of life, both material and spiritual.⁷

Scholars from related fields also seized onto film’s power to reclaim the visual dimension and thus to interpret its time. Only a few years later, Erwin Panofsky stressed the way in which the figurative and plastic arts start with an idea to be projected into shapeless matter, and not with the objects that constitute the physical world. This journey from the abstract to the concrete allows them to transmit an idealistic conception that is no longer in line with their times. With bodies and things at its point of departure, it is the movies, and only the movies, that do justice to that materialistic interpretation of the universe which, whether we like it or not, pervades contemporary civilization.⁸ Film’s tendency to lay bare the spirit of its age did not, however, necessarily require that it function merely as a mirror. Siegfried Kracauer, who gave careful attention to the typical themes running through early cinema, pointed out that even the most fantastic of these reveal how society wants to see itself.⁹ The pervasive thought is that film, in its complexity, is a sign of its time. Léon Moussinac observed in 1925: Within the great modern upheaval, an art is born, develops, discovers its laws one by one, moves slowly toward its perfection, an art that will be the very expression—bold, powerful original—of the ideal of the new age.¹⁰

Keeping all of this in mind, let us move ahead to the German cultural theorist and critic Walter Benjamin and his canonical essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.¹¹

SYNCHRONIES

According to Benjamin, every phase of the history of man grasps reality in its own way: Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception.¹² The kind of gaze that a historical period adopts manifests the concerns and interests of that period, and refers back in turn to the underlying social processes that feed these concerns. Benjamin suggests that twentieth-century modernity is dominated by two tendencies, both linked to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life.¹³ The two tendencies are the desire of the present-day masses to ‘get closer’ to things spatially and humanly, and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness.¹⁴ We see here on the one hand an attempt to overcome distance, a need for nearness; on the other, a sense of universal sameness. With their emphasis on proximity and equality, these two tendencies legitimate a novel stance: what surrounds us must be captured in a plain and direct manner, without hindrance or restraint—even if, by necessity, through mechanical reproduction.

Film is an exemplary tool for attaining this end. Its gaze breaks down conventional barriers between ourselves and reality:

Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of the split second, so that now we can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris.¹⁵

Its gaze is able to draw us into the very fabric of things:

Just as enlargement not merely clarifies what we see indistinctly in any case, but brings to light entirely new structures of matter, slow motion not only reveals familiar aspects of movements, but discloses quite unknown aspects within them.¹⁶

This is a gaze that can astonish us with the rapidity of its insight. While the traditional arts stimulated contemplation, floods of filmic images provoke continuous shock.¹⁷ The filmic gaze is a leveling gaze that can reframe everything and everyone within a principle of equality. Benjamin writes: the newsreel offers everyone the chance to rise from passer-by to movie extra.¹⁸ Finally, it is a gaze that can dispense with the uniqueness that characterizes the traditional work of art, since it can be replicated on every film print and during every projection. Speaking about actors, Benjamin notices: now the mirror image has become detachable from the person mirrored and is transportable.¹⁹ Of course, there are contrary impulses as well. Cinematic technology operates as a filter; habit leads to inattention; the optical unconscious, giving the spectator the knowledge of things that could never be seen previously,²⁰ complicates the relationship between observer and what is observed. Nevertheless it is true that film celebrates and manifests the nearness and the sameness of things. It does so in conjunction with an age that privileges these values by stripping any aura from the work of art, which is transformed from an object of veneration to a mere object of display.²¹

Here it becomes important to define more precisely film and its relation to the century it represents. If these two spheres really do converge, at what points do they meet? And how does this convergence mutually condition each? What kind of film and what kind of modernity does this convergence produce? In short, what made film an interlocutor for modernity?

I will try to answer these questions by following three parallel paths. To begin with, it is film’s power as a medium that played a decisive role in creating the convergences we have identified. It acted primarily as a means of communication—even more than as a means of expression. And it did this in an age which saw the media, rather than the traditional arts, as the preferred instrument for exploring and unifying experience. Film was the medium of choice in a profoundly mediated era. It was significant too that film not only highlighted the questions of its time, but recast them, making them its own, and at the same time giving them an iconic value in the eyes of all. It did this in a period when cultural institutions charged with elaborating social values and concerns were in deep crisis. Cinema redefined the conceptual field at a time when this function was partly unfilled. Yet film would not have been so successful as a medium if it had not been able to resolve contradictory impulses and negotiate compromises between them. Let us remember that this was an age that had numerous and distressing conflicts in need of mediation. Film is a space of reconciliation: it forces us into contact with reality, but is simultaneously grounded in distraction. It offers fantastical images and ideas but reincorporates them in plausible scenarios. It provokes and stimulates, but also organizes and disciplines.

First, film is a medium for the exhibition and exchange of proposals; second, it is a sphere in which the impulses of its time can be reworked and made iconic; and third, it is a space in which these contradictory impulses can come to the negotiating table. In the remainder of this chapter I will elaborate on these three theses with the help of three essays by Louis Delluc as well as other theoretical texts from the 1920s. I have privileged the 1920s here because the debate of this decade is highly interesting. It occurred after two decades of examining film as a surprising modern experience, and it came before the standardization of film’s linguistic and expressive devices in the 1930s. The 1920s constitute an essential hinge between moments of utopian euphoria and subsequent systematization. What unfolds in this decade is the attempt to gradually transform a novelty into an institution.²² We have various positions scattered over various geographical poles (Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Rome, America), but also a largely common concern. In this framework, Delluc’s relevance lies in his basic attitude: suspended between the defense of traditional values and attention to the clashes within them, he is more subtly contradictory than most early critics, and shows the complicated way in which awareness of cultural change often develops.

DE L’ART ET DU TRAFFIC

It quickly became clear that film was, more than anything else, an instrument of communication in the broad sense of the term. Undeniably, film also claimed for itself a place in the field of aesthetics: the terms fifth art, eighth art, and even seventh art prove this (the last, coined by Ricciotto Canudo, having come into everyday use).²³ But however much its expressive possibilities were extolled, its masterpieces enumerated, or its influence on other arts recognized, the aspects of film that stood out most prominently were its popular appeal, the universality of its language, and the industrial quality of its production. Critics sometimes seemed uncomfortable acknowledging these latter characteristics of film as an object of mass consumption. Rather than recognize them, they recycled old categories from the field of art history such as authorship. Yet even those who most wished to incorporate film into the aesthetic traditions of the past (beginning with Canudo himself)²⁴ had to realize it was a new form of experience that demanded new critical canons.

Louis Delluc’s short essay, The Fifth Art (Le cinquième art, 1919),²⁵ seems exemplary of this critical dilemma. Delluc begins the piece with his usual mélange of aesthetic dissatisfaction with the cinema and hope for what it could be: An art, of course it will be an art. He goes on, however, to list a series of characteristics that point to a different line of criticism. First he points out film’s spatial diffusion: Film goes everywhere. Theater halls are built by the thousands in every country, films have been shot all over the world. Next, he acknowledges its extraordinary power of persuasion: The screen … has more impact on the international masses than a political speech. He notes as well the instant stardom that film offers its actors: A year—even six months—is sufficient for a name, a grimace, a smile to compel recognition from the world. And similarly, the attention it stirs in the public: It is a powerful means to get the people to speak. Finally, he stresses the importance of not only the commercial but also the technical dimension of cinema. American supremacy in the field, he argues, is linked to the technical improvement of the image, lighting, sets, and scripts, which gives a harmonious nature to their science. In the conclusion of the piece Delluc revises his opening thoughts: We are witnessing the birth of an extraordinary art: perhaps the only modern art that already has a place apart and one day will have astonishing glory; for it—and it alone, I tell you—is son of the mechanical and the human ideal. Delluc echoes here, in more positive terms, the withering definition of cinema that he provided some lines earlier: This expressive industry is heading toward the simultaneous perfection of art and traffic.

Art and traffic. In this biting characterization, Delluc not only expresses the need to draw attention to a dimension other than—though linked to—the artistic; he also offers a powerful image of what makes a medium. What, in fact, do we normally mean by this term? A medium is, above all, a means of transmitting sensations, thoughts, words, sounds, and images. Its main objective is the spreading of information and, in the case of mass media, the widest spreading of information that technology will allow (film goes everywhere). The pursuit of this objective gives rise to three closely interrelated features which define all media. In order to spread information, a medium must also be able to gather, readapt, and conserve it: a medium works on content in order to render it consumable (the happy fate of a name, a grimace, a smile). By spreading information,